This Site Wants To Make Hospital Visits A Little Less Awful

Katie Jennings / Business Insider Hospital visits can be pretty awful, but a site called Bedside is trying to make them a little better.

"Bedside helps you keep friends and family updated, coordinate visitors and gifts, and make your loved one's stay a little less lonely," the site's homepage reads.

New York City-based Tanooki Labs created Bedside in 2012 as a "portfolio project for good," and they decided to leave it completely open source and free.

According to Eric Skiff, a cofounder of Tanooki Labs and one of the creators of Bedside, Tanooki plans to resume active development of Bedside in the near future.

"When we first started Tanooki Labs we wanted to create a portfolio project that represented the types of apps we could build in a short amount of time (Bedside was built in a week!), and had previously pitched each other on the idea of an app for making hospital stays suck less," Skiff told Business Insider in an email. "It seemed like a great opportunity to use that effort to put something out that solves a real need and helps people, and to put it out to the world as an open source project."

It will help people coordinate visits so that visitors are spread out evenly throughout the day instead of a huge crowd at once with large spaces in between visits. It also lets people update their friends and family and allows them to send messages in response.

Patients can also create wishlists so that visitors can bring them exactly what they want.

And the last cool feature on the site is that users can add tips and advice for specific hospitals so that patients and their friends and family can learn from those who were there before them. Users can share anything from how to get good parking to proper etiquette when visiting a patient.

It is completely free to create an account with Bedside. All you need to do is enter your email address, name, and password and then create a page by entering the patient's name, hospital, room, and visiting hours. Users will need to be invited to view the patient's page and add themselves to the visitor schedule.

Bedside seems pretty simple, but for something that can be so stressful and hectic, a little simplicity can go a long way.

Here's the site's homepage:

Bedside

This is what a patient page looks like:

Bedside

It is interesting to note that there is already an iOS app called Bedside that is also in the hospital space, though it is doctor-facing as opposed to patient-facing. Tanooki's Bedside does not yet have a mobile app, though its website uses responsive design so it's mobile-friendly. It is unclear if there would be issues with using the same name on a mobile app.

"As for a mobile app, that may be an interesting direction to take Bedside, especially for the caregivers that are literally at the bedside, often without a computer, but for now we've focused on making the site as accessible and useful to everyone we can by focusing on mobile-friendly responsive design," Skiff said. "As for the name, name overlaps happen quite a bit in the app store, so I'm not too concerned that it would create confusion, especially as the other bedside app serves a different need and hasn't been updated since 2010."